


A Sunken Lane

by summoninglupine



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Adolescent Sexuality, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-22 05:36:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20869034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summoninglupine/pseuds/summoninglupine
Summary: The jade pagoda on the corner of Holloway Road and Tufnell Park Road was a thing that should not be. The girl who sat before her on the bus, with her bobbed hair and jumpsuit, was, to Victoria's mind, likewise, incongruous.





	A Sunken Lane

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AuroraCloud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraCloud/gifts).

When you are young, she considered, it was often said that the things you felt with such intensity would eventually pass in time, that you wouldn’t carry them with you for the rest of your life. New Year had come and gone and the end of the decade had been celebrated with loud music and joyful singing and an altercation with Frank Harris that had told her what she already had known for the longest time—that she was less of a daughter to Frank and Maggie and more of a interloper. Remembering the warmth of Frank’s breath, the taste of alcohol on his lips, had been more than enough to prove that, and when she had been greeted by a frosty reception from Maggie the following morning, Frank standing uncertainly behind her, and the polite request that she find alternate lodgings, she had then understood the true distance between them all. 

The first full day of the new year had been full of tears and regret, and yet, as January had rolled along, Victoria Waterfield had eventually found her feet, sitting in front of the television set in her sparse flat, legs folded up beneath her on the armchair as she ate cereal from a chipped bowl and watched news of meteorites landing in Epping.

If you had asked her then what she had thought 1970 might bring, she would not have immediately said blackouts, and yet, blackouts were what the New Year brought, and in the dark, lighting candles to make her way, Victoria Waterfield felt that both her childhood and the spirit of the previous decade had ended.

1970 felt like becoming an adult twice. In 1866, she had been 14-years-old and considered an adult, yet in 1968, she had been considered a child and told by everyone around her that she must wait until she turned 16, and now in 1970, living alone in a dim top floor flat on Holloway Road, she was told that, despite all this, she would not be a proper adult until she was 18.

Again, if you had asked her then what she thought 1970 might bring, she would not have immediately said an extraordinarily blunt girl with bobbed hair and a small pagoda made of jade.

*

The jade pagoda had resided on the corner of Holloway Road and Tufnell Park Road, its shape incongruous, overshadowed by the presence of the nearby cinema. She had walked past it several times without thinking too much of it before her first encounter with the other girl. Holloway Road then had been rich with the sound of music from transistor radios, slow moving traffic, and news broadcasts discussing the misbehaviour of pop stars. Later on, whilst a connexion was not especially made between the meteorites that had fallen in Oxley Woods, Epping, there had been a spate of crimes in which department store windows had been broken and mannequins had been vandalised. On her way to and from work, passing that curious jade pagoda as the 263 bus had crawled slowly down towards Highbury and Islington, Victoria had seen the front windows of Selbys broken in and a number of mannequins strewn about in the street and thought it strange that there had been quite a few soldiers surveying the scene, patches with the word U-N-I-T on their arms.

She tried not to think too much on the matter for it seemed terribly like the sort of business that she would not wish to be involved in. She was 16-years-old after all, and, having lost both her father and mother when she had been younger, Victoria Waterfield was more than aware of how quickly life could change and how devastating unusual events such as these could impact them.

The world passed by and she became only dimly aware of the girl sitting before her in the jumpsuit made of a strange artificial material, her stern look, her dark hair, occasionally lifting up a pair of binoculars to gaze out of the window. London was full of so many strange people that it did not seem worth her while to question the girl’s behaviour, and yet, between Holloway Road and Tufnell Park, when she saw the girl slip inside that mysterious jade pagoda, Victoria felt a sudden sense of curiosity overcome her, and, against her better nature, decided to make inquires.

*

The inside of the pagoda seemed instantly familiar though markedly different. It was not the warm, brightly lit environment she had once recalled, but rather a dimly lit affair of reduced size, a large console shaped like a mushroom in the centre, glowing softly, the walls decorated with cupboards filled with first aid supplies.

The girl with the dark hair turned to look at her in surprise, a startled expression upon her face from which she quickly recovered.

“I wasn’t expecting visitors,” she proclaimed in a rather matter-of-fact manner.

With wide eyes, Victoria looked around her at the sparsely decorated room within the small pagoda.

“Oh, it’s a TARDIS, isn’t it? Please say it is!” she proclaimed.

The other girl blinked in surprise.

“It’s more an escape pod than an actual TARDIS,” she said, and then added, “but how do you know what a TARDIS looks like?”

Victoria smiled warmly.

“I used to travel in one,” she said with glee, and then her expression slowly changed, “that is, the Doctor was kind enough to take me with him after my father died.”

The other girl’s eyes widened.

“T-The Doctor?” she exclaimed. “No wonder you were allowed inside!”

At this, surprise and shock coloured Victoria’s expression and she peered cautiously into the dim corners of the control room where no light fell.

“I-Is the Doctor here?” she asked with a sense of apprehension and excitement.

“No,” the other girl said, “you see, that’s the problem.”

She sighed, evidence of frustration and confusion on her small, round face, and, unexpectedly, Victoria found her heart beating just the tiniest bit faster.

“Perhaps I should start at the beginning,” the other girl said. “My name is Zoe Heriot, and, for the longest time after I met the Doctor, I had the terrible feeling that I was forgetting something.”

*

Having heard the fate of the Doctor, Victoria Waterfield was not ashamed to have wept, considering this another bereavement of sorts—and hadn’t the world been full of such sadness as of late? First the loss of her mother and father, then the loss of Frank and Maggie Harris through what she felt were her own stupid actions, and now this news of the Doctor, sentenced and condemned by his own people.

She wondered then if he was still the same man, wherever it was that he had been banished to, if, somewhere in the galaxy, he was still out there in his silly, little hat, playing his silly recorder.

She had been overwrought with emotion, hastily leaving the pagoda much to the other girl’s alarm, and she could not remember the journey home, a short distance from where the pagoda rested, but she remembered Zoe running after her, remembered her hand reached out for her, and remembered her arms about her as they had both sat together on the corner of Victoria’s bed in the small, relatively empty little flat, the television offering news of the failure of some experimental nuclear power plant in the fenland somewhere far, far from London.

That night had been how it had begun, with Victoria in tears and Zoe explaining how she believed the Ship had sensed the urgency of the Doctor’s dire situation and sent the pagoda to her, how she believed it was attempting to bring together those who had known him, to save him from the fate his people had imposed upon him.

Victoria had not known what to say then in response to the other girl’s words, and so, like that night in December, 1969, she had simply leaned across the bed and kissed her, and, with the sound of the television in the background, the Permanent Under-Secretary of something-or-other making a statement about this or that, Zoe Heriot had surprisingly returned the kiss with both passion and compassion.

How different her lips had tasted from those of Frank Harris, Victoria thought later, how gentle, how soft her touch. As the rain had begun to fall and the curtains had been stirred with the breeze from the open window, they had quietly slipped into bed together, bathed in the pale blue light of the television, quiet, passionate kisses exchanged, Zoe’s knowing fingers gently guiding her own.

In the dark, with this girl whom she had only just met, this girl with whom she felt such a connexion despite the difference between them, Victoria Waterfield whispered quiet words she had never expected to voice.

*

The days that followed were a time of confusion and bliss, the Minister of Technology assuring the public from the warm glow of the television that the detaining of three astronauts recently returned from their maiden voyage was of the upmost importance to public safety.

Each morning, they would rise with the sun climbing in the skies above them, greeting each other with kisses, midwinter forgotten as spring blossomed, and, together they would dress, Victoria chusing each outfit for Zoe from amongst her wardrobe with both care and tenderness. They spent months like this, separated only by Victoria’s departure for work each day, a cold typewriter at her fingertips in the offices of International Electromatics in central London, reunited each evening with her return. In this way, they enjoyed a sort of domesticity, their private lives hidden from the world outside and its absurd and irrational views.

“It’s not like this in the future,” Zoe had said, a news report on television informing them of how much Project Inferno would change their lives going unheeded.

Within the comfort of the bed they shared, she had turned to the other girl, naked but for the sheets they were wrapped within, and a curious sense of enthusiasm had taken her.

“In the future, people are less concerned with your sexuality or your gender or the number of partners you have had and more concerned that you are a member of society. Where I come from, on Space Station W3, we are encouraged to engage in ethically non-monogamous relationships, everyone in the future is; it makes for a happier environment, you see. There is a greater sense of community when the community is bound together not by—”

“You live on a _space station_?” Victoria exclaimed with awe, her eyes wide.

“Why, yes,” Zoe answered matter-of-factly. “That was where I first met the Doctor.”

Mention of his name changed the tone of their conversation somewhat, a sense of indebtedness, a sudden sense of urgency.

“I think the Ship sought you out for a reason, Zoe. I think it brought you here so that we could meet.”

Zoe was silent for a moment.

“Do you think he’s all right? The Doctor, I mean.”

Victoria smiled warmly.

“I think there’s very little that could stop the Doctor. I think that, whatever happens, the universe will always need the Doctor, that the universe will always find a reason for the Doctor to exist.”

She hadn’t realised until Zoe kissed her that she was crying, hadn’t felt the tears until she likewise felt those of the other girl.

Gentle kisses and the warmth of her embrace, this, thought Victoria, was what such moments should feel like, this was what she had been missing for so very long—not family but _community_. She leant into the other girl’s kisses, reached out with her arms and wrapped her legs around her, feeling the warmth of her, the excitement of her, the calm night air through the open window dancing above them, the light of the moon and the glow of the television discolouring the scene, affording a strange and spectral glow to that tiny flat on Holloway Road.

In the moments between sleep and wakefulness, exhausted by the warmth they shared together, Victoria’s mind turned over the events that had brought them together and the strength of her conviction when she thought about the ways in which the TARDIS might have brought them together.

During her travels with the Doctor and dear Jamie, she had often, out of the corner of her eye, glimpsed a slender cat robed in silver fur. It had become Victoria’s opinion over time that the cat was the Ship and vice-versa, and somehow, despite the absence of the Doctor, she felt that the way in which the TARDIS had separated from itself and sent an escape pod to that distant space station one hundred years in the future where Zoe waited was not a mistake—the TARDIS wanted to bring them together, it wanted to believe in a story that was that much more than what had thus far been told; it wanted to believe that for all of the sorrow of growing up, for all of the mistakes people made when young, there was still happiness in their futures.

When you are young, she considered, it was often said that the things you felt with such intensity would eventually pass in time, that you wouldn’t carry them with you for the rest of your life, and yet here, in that small flat on Holloway Road, wrapped in the arms of her friend, her lover, Victoria Waterfield felt that her feelings would never change, that, in a sense, she would be the girl who lay here in the arms of another for the rest of her life. And though there were tears in her eyes once more, this time, they were tears of happiness.

In the dark, the television whispered quietly of the abandonment of Project Inferno, and, in contentment, Victoria drifted quietly into the arms of sleep.


End file.
